1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for providing data to an application program from different environments and, in particular, processing the data with at least one routine to make available to the application program.
2. Description of the Related Art
The International Business Machine Corporation""s (IBM) interactive problem control system (IPCS) is a tool provided with the IBM MVS operating system to aid in diagnosing software failures. IPCS provides formatting and analysis support for dumps and traces produced by MVS, other program products, and applications that run on MVS.** A dump occurs during an abnormal end of a program (ABEND). If such a system error occurs, data in memory is written to disk storage, i.e., dumped. IPCS is used to format and analyze unformatted dumps. When unformatted dump data sets are submitted, IPCS simulates dynamic address translation (DAT) and other storage management functions to recreate the system environment at the time of the dump. IPCS reads the unformatted dump data and translates it into words. For example, IPCS can identify jobs with error return codes, resource contention in the system, and control block overlays.
To utilize IPCS, a system administrator must enter a series of specialized commands to perform dump and trace analysis, such as analyze, format, view, retrieve, and copy dump and trace data, and to maintain an IPCS session. Details of the IPCS program are described in the IBM publication xe2x80x9cOS/390 MVS Interactive Problem Control System (IPCS) User""s Guide,xe2x80x9d IBM document no. GC28-1756-00 (IBM Copyright 1996), which publication is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
One problem with IPCS is the difficulty in analyzing the compressed and unformatted dumped data to determine the source of the error. Thus, there is a need in the art to integrate utilities especially useful for presenting formatted and compressed data with programs that provide access to data dumps, such as IPCS.
To address the shortcomings in the prior art discussed above, preferred embodiments disclose a method, system, and program for making data available to a first application program. A determination is made of an environment in which the first application program is called. Data is accessed in a first format if the determined environment is a first environment. Otherwise, if the determined environment is a second environment, then a second application program is called. The second application program performs accessing data in a second format and storing the accessed data in a storage location. The accessed data in the storage location is accessible to the first application program.
In further embodiments, the data in the second format is dumped from memory during an abnormal end. In such case, the first application program is capable of decompressing and formatting the dumped data for diagnostic purposes.
In still further embodiments, the second application program comprises at least one get routine to access the data and at least one convert routine to convert the accessed data to another format. In such case, the get routine accesses the data in the second format and the convert routine converts the data to another format before storing the accessed data in the storage location for access by the first application program.
Preferred embodiments provide a programming technique to make data available to a utility program when the utility program would not otherwise have access to the data. With the preferred embodiments, a standard set of routines may be used to interface data from one environment with the utility program that operates in a different environment. With the preferred embodiment technique, dump data can be accessed from an IPCS environment and made available to the DSN1PRNT utility to format and decompress for diagnostic purposes. In this way, the diagnostic features of one program, e.g., DSN1PRNT, can be used to access data, e.g., dump data, that would normally not be accessible to the utility.